Self-harm using poison is a serious public health problem in Sri Lanka. As part of an effort to tackle the problem, clinical trials are used to identify effective antidotes. This talk describes the conduct of trials in this unusual and difficult context. Based on ethnographic material collected in rural hospitals in Sri Lanka between 2008 and 2009, this talk outlines three subject positions crucial to understanding the complexity of such clinical trials. At one level, research participants who have taken poison might be thought of as abjects, that is, stigmatised by actions that have placed them at the very limits of physical and social life. They have seriously harmed themselves in an act that often leads to death, marking the act as a suicide. Yet, this is the point when they are recruit Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Professor Janet Radcliffe-Richards gives (OUC Distinguished Research Fellow) gives the first of three lectures on feminism for the Uehiro Practical Ethics lecture series. After a hundred and fifty years of feminism, we are still struggling to achieve a satisfactory legal and social framework for managing the relations of the sexes. This is partly, of course, because so many men have been unwilling to give up their traditional privileges, and the original feminist project is still far from finished. But more fundamentally than that, we have no clear conception of what a fair arrangement would be. You can regard some kinds of inequality as definitely unjust while being in considerable doubt about others. And even if we ever thought we had reached an ideal solution, the endlessly shifting lan Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

There is widespread belief that terrorism can never be morally justified, ut this belief is not widespread amongst philosophers; they offer a variety of justifications for some terrorist acts. Seminar 2 of 3 in the Series 'The Meaning of Terrorism - philosophical perspectives' Tony Coady is one of Australia's best-known philosophers. He has an outstanding international reputation for his writings on epistemology and on political violence and political ethics. Coady's best-known work, Testimony: a Philosophical Study (OUP, 1992), relates to the epistemological problems posed by testimony. In addition to his academic work, he is a regular contributor to public debate on topics having to do with ethical and philosophical dimensions of current affairs. A professor of philosophy at the Uni Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

In this talk, Professor Plomer (Chair in Law and Bioethics, University of Sheffield) argues that, from a legal perspective, the EU ban on hESC patents is seriously flawed. To her knowledge, it is the first ruling of a supranational court conferring legal protection to frozen embryos on the back of legislation formally relating to patents and in disregard of diversity of moral and legal cultures on hESC research in Europe. Professor Plomer argues that the ruling sets a dangerous constitutional precedent and could have profound influences on the direction of future funding policy and research laws in the European Union. See Guardian article http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/dec/12/eu-ban-stem-cell-patents?INTCMP=SRCH Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, draws on her experience as a trustee of the Booker Prize and as a judge for many other literary prizes to offer a response to the question, 'What is a Classic?'. Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/